Tea Party delusions

It’s been weird watching class warfare erupt in a country that likes to believe it doesn’t have classes, apart from those in airport queues.

In what commentators say has been the fiercest US mid-term election, the insults between the haves and the have-nots were acerbic.

But this wasn’t a classic struggle between capitalists and workers (as some dead intellectual might have described it). The American class divide of 2010 was between the elites and real Americans (as the Tea Party people tagged it). It was a shoot-out between the country club members and the hillbillies (as Republicans put it). It’s been a shouting match between Fox network audiences and Jon Stewart fans (as cultural warriors put it).

In reality, it’s been a showdown between those who have a future in America and those who don’t.

Just to recap on some of the more memorable moments. Karl Rove, who helped George W. Bush stay in power, showed his colours when he told a German newspaper: “It’s not like these people have the read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek."

Typical, replied “these people", aka Tea Party people. The
Karl Rove
s of the conservative movement, they said, had a “country club attitude" that would never let the likes of them into the main dining room.

The Tea Party poster girl,
Sarah Palin
, responded that she wouldn’t be quoting from Mao or Saul Alinsky – one of whom is the President’s favourite philosopher and the other she can almost see from her balcony.

Further out in the field, the lefty-leaning New York Times was writing about “Tea Party hillbillies" and President
Barack Obama
was being shellacked for being “a glacial elitist – a man who would hardly deign to pass comment on the rubes and proles", as Christopher Hitchens put it.

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Meanwhile, the middle ground was occupied by a couple of comics, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and their Rally for Sanity, which featured placards that read I See Smart People and Tea Parties are for Mad Haters. (My favourite was Is This the Line for the Justin Bieber Concert?)

Such pithy fun, however, doesn’t reach those who feel forgotten, irrelevant and fearful about their future. For them, it was the oft-repeated words of Sarah Palin to work for “real Americans" and to “take back America" that captured their hearts.

The Tea Party’s rhetoric has always been about rearguard action. When Palin talks of real Americans, she is drawing a picture of those who do “real" work with their hands, who get around in pick-ups, live in “real" places outside cities and don’t have to grapple with high-falutin’ concepts or big words to get on in life. She’s talking about the people that Obama said sought refuge in guns and religion.

When she talks of “taking back America" she is alluding to both a conquest of ideas and a track back through time. She wants to take America back to better times. Preferably, she’d like to take the country back to the free spirits of the Boston tea party (as the party’s name suggests) but if not, then back to a time when the average American was . . . average.

She’s tapping into a yearning for the America of the postwar years, that period up to the 1970s when jobs were secure, cars were big, debts were small and homes were forever.

She’s talking about the past. She knows it and her supporters suspect it. And it doesn’t take an economist’s timeline of worsening inequality since the 1970s to prove it.

The real America they see in the rear-view mirror of their pick-ups is gone. The rot began in the ’70s when domestic policies began switching national wealth from the middle class to the super rich and it has been accelerated by the rise of Asia and the latest recession.

The three-year recession accelerated the decline of so-called medium-skilled jobs. The only jobs growth in the US in the past decade has been in the highly skilled and low-skilled areas and those with medium skills have been forced further down the chain to find work.

The prolonged recession hasn’t arrived in the dining rooms of country clubs (indeed, the incomes of the super rich increased five-fold in the year after the global financial crisis). The recession hasn’t dampened the humour of those with college degrees and a Jon Stewart habit but it is destroying a class of people who once had a secure job and a thriving hometown.

And it won’t come back. The future of America, like the future of countries around the world, belongs to those with education, training and an entrepreneurial drive. And those things don’t come easily in rust-belt towns.

The class of old America might gather around country halls to rail against “lamestream media" and “country club elites". They might even pick up the odd voice in Congress. But their future is in no doubt and it wasn’t just the newly elected Republican speaker who choked up when talking of chasing the American dream.

Old America is – understandably – raging against the dying of the light.